Ensigning My Heart Away
by Curlscat
Summary: Star Trek Puckabrina AU oneshot. Title is ridiculous, story is slightly less so. Might be a crossover? Basic knowledge of Star Trek will be helpful to read this fic but is not necessary. Sabrina can't stand the new ensign on her ship, but when a crisis comes, she'll have to depend on him to get them out of it.


**AN~ Requested by Epiphany Paige on tumblr. Just for kicks.**

* * *

Sabrina's promotion to chief tactical officer of the Starfleet ship Everafter came as a complete surprise. It was a result of the previous chief tactical officer's decision to stay on a planet full of giant humanoids who seemed to think he was some kind of plaything. Sabrina would miss Jack, but he'd been a bit of a jerk, and she was one of the youngest chief tactical officers in the fleet, so really, it wasn't all that big a deal.

Except, you know, that her sister had decided to throw a party.

Which wasn't bad, really. Most of Sabrina's friends were there. But still, she was the center of attention, which had always made her a bit uncomfortable. She was much happier in the shadows.

Actually, chief tactical officer might not be the best position for her. Like, at all. But it was too late to back out now.

And she knew she'd be good at it. So she might as well just enjoy the party and get used to the idea.

Still, parties. She was pretty sure she didn't even know most of the people here.

Like that guy with the wings over there. Humanoid, sure, like most of her area of starfleet (made for easier ship design), but she didn't think she even knew what planet had people with large pink wings coming out of their back, let alone have any friends from said planet.

She saw Snow off in the distance, and hurried to the woman, a one-quarter Vulcan equivalent of a princess who probably shouldn't have been working for Starfleet. She was a good deal older than Sabrina, even considering the way her Vulcan blood elongated her life expectancy, but the two were good friends. It helped that both women understood rebelling against parental ideals.

"How are you enjoying your party?" Snow asked, giving Sabrina a warm smile.

Sabrina gave Snow a look that conveyed very clearly exactly what she thought of the party. "The food is good," she said out loud.

Snow grinned and said, "It is at that."

Sabrina nodded at the boy she'd noticed earlier, the one with the wings. "I've never seen someone like that before. Where's he from?"

"Hippolyta three," Snow said. "One of four inhabited planets in the solar system. They're all the same base species, but there's a lot of genetic anomaly because of how long the colonies have been separated." She winked at Sabrina and said, "And they're capable of interbreeding with us."

Sabrina gave Snow a look implying that that information did nothing for either of them. Snow was currently in the middle of a very complicated affair with someone who was probably Romulan and almost definitely not a good person to get mixed up with, and Sabrina was entirely too busy to get mixed up in anything sexual. Although those wings _were_ fascinating. Then again, Snow often said things like that without really meaning them, just because she wanted to prove she wasn't stiff and emotionless like most Vulcans.

"You should talk to him," Snow said. "Everyone I've met from the Hippolyta system is fascinating."

Well, it wasn't like she had anything else to do. And Since Snow was eyeing the crowd, looking for a tall head covered in black hair, Sabrina figured she might as well let her friend go off and romance her jerk of a boyfriend.

So Sabrina waved goodbye to Snow and wove her way through the crowd, heading vaguely in the direction of the boy with the wings, stopping to smile and chat a bit with people she actually knew, who offered her their congratulations on her promotion. By the time she actually got to the boy, she was in the middle of a conversation with one of her friends from Sirius five, a wolf-girl named Red, whose father was apparently here somewhere, and she only met him because he was flying overhead and kicked her shoulder in passing.

"Watch it!" Sabrina snapped.

The boy turned a grin on her that grated on Sabrina's nerves, and Sabrina noticed for the first time that he wore a starfleet uniform the same color as hers- yellow. When he saw how annoyed she looked, his grin just got wider. Sabrina immediately changed her mind about wanting to talk to him or get to know him at all. What she wanted to do was get as far away from him as possible.

He didn't apologize. What he did to was say, "Hey, you're my new boss!"

"What?" Sabrina asked, squinting at him with her head cocked to one side.

"Your sister invited me," he said. "I just transferred onto your ship. You're the new chief tactical officer, right? This is your party?"

"Yeah..." Sabrina said, still looking at the boy like she wasn't entirely sure what to make of him. She also wasn't sure it was her party, considering Daphne's idea of 'a small, intimate gathering' consisted of something very different than hers did.

The boy gave her a melodramatic bow from midair, almost kicking three other people in the process, and said, "Ensign Puck, at your service."

"Great, well, Ensign Puck, do me a favor and don't kick anyone else while you're here," Sabrina said, and she turned back to continue her conversation with Red.

He kicked her on his way away.

* * *

"I hate him," Sabrina told Red. "I hate him. I bet he got transferred here because his old ship couldn't stand him."

Red made soothing noises but didn't actually agree with Sabrina, which she supposed was all she could expect. It wasn't good form to complain like this. But Ensign Puck was driving her crazy. As if her job wasn't hard enough, she had to be saddled with an underling who didn't listen to a word she said _and_ did things like recalibrating her machines to spell bad words in eight different languages. Usually by carving them into asteroids. It was only luck it hadn't been something more important yet. Like another ship. Or a _planet_.

Sabrina wasn't sure she could make it the remaining five months of their six-month mission without strangling the guy.

Either way, she was putting in a transfer request as soon as she possibly could. His only redeeming quality was his exceptionally pretty face.

* * *

Four months later, that opinion would change.

Captain Seven, along with several other key members of the regular bridge crew, was in the medical bay, suffering from a stab wound to the chest from some Romulan weapon, and Sabrina found herself very suddenly trying to run a ship and avert a war at the same time, neither of which she had any idea how to do. She was pretty sure that if they weren't in deep space with all their pods out of commission, she'd have run out of the airlock in terror.

Sabrina had appointed anyone who she knew to be the least bit capable to most of the positions, but for her own position she'd been stuck. Most of the tactical crew that were actually worth something were in the med bay, and she'd been forced to direct Puck to her regular spot, with the barked instruction "Don't break anything we need."

She sat in the captain's chair in the center of the room and gripped the arms so tight she thought she might break a fingernail. She didn't belong here. She was nineteen years old. What did she know about running a ship, let alone directing a battle? She was going to destroy everything.

If she didn't play her cards right, she might not just destroy a ship full of people she cared about, she might destroy half the _Federation_.

But she didn't have time to dither. If she was going to go down, she might as well do it in flames. She took a deep breath and began to issue orders.

* * *

Puck blew the other ship up.

On the one hand, Sabrina understood. There hadn't been much choice, and she'd been seconds away from ordering him to do that anyway. On the other hand, she _hadn't_ ordered him to do it, and the Romulans were going to blame them for this. There was going to be a war.

She was going to yell at him. In fact, she'd already taken a breath to tell him exactly how wrong that was and how she was going to get him demoted so far he'd be mopping up the floors of a Starfleet base in the middle of nowhere for the next twenty years, when he interrupted her by flicking something onto the viewing screen.

He'd recorded the whole thing.

Sabrina stared at the recording, then turned to blink at Puck. "It broke," she said. Half the material on the ship had broken, recording system included. But this... this proved that the attack was provoked by the Romulans.

"I fixed it," Puck said with a shrug.

Of course he'd fixed it. That glorious, infuriating programming genius had fixed the programming system in his spare time. Of course.

Later, once someone else was running the ship, she pulled him aside and said, "You still should have waited for me to give the order."

Puck, who for once was neither resting nor flying (she'd yelled at him _so many times_ for flying through the tiny halls of the ship and knocking people over), shrugged. "I thought... I mean, it's a rough thing, killing an entire ship, even if they'll kill you otherwise. I figured I'd spare you that. I mean, you're... what? Twenty of your years? You don't need that burden."

"Oh," Sabrina said softly. This was both the most serious and sweetest thing she'd ever heard Puck say. Then she blinked at him. "Wait a second- how old are you?"

Puck, who was already walking off, turned around and grinned at her. "Oh, about four thousand of your years, give or take."

Sabrina gaped at him for a minute, trying to figure out how the oldest person she'd ever met was also less mature than her nine-year-old brother.

* * *

This was the tipping point. By the time the ship was running on less than a skeleton crew and Sabrina could permanently go back to her old job without any extra responsibilities, she'd come to depend on Puck's ingenuity as much as she hated his pranks. He still peeved her more than she could say, but he made her laugh, too. And he _was_ gorgeous.

So when they kissed, Sabrina supposed it was sort of the natural progression of things. And if she punched him right after, it was only because he'd surprised her, and she pulled him back down to her level to kiss him again right after.


End file.
